His Braid
by Alys Blue
Summary: He wished he had kept the braid a little while longer, as a memento, as a reminder of what and who he was fighting for.


**AN: Decided to play through the first game again, got through the opening sequence of the village being attacked, saw the braid in his hair, and was immediately inspired and distracted. **

**This is the result of that distraction.**

**Warning, I do believe I took some creative liberties, but nothing overly serious.**

He hadn't wanted the braid in his hair. In fact, he had insisted against it, had pleaded with his older sister, begged her, implored her not to braid his hair, which, in truth, was in dire need of a good cut. But, as usual, she had ignored his pleas, sat him down on the floor between her knees, and taken her nimble fingers to his tangled dark hair.

First, she had attempted to comb through his tresses with her long, pale fingers, but she found the task of unknotting his hair nigh impossible, and soon took to his head with her own brush. She talked all the while, about insignificant things that had slipped from his mind like smoke through his fingers, however much he yearned to remember it later. He had pouted and fidgeted and clicked his tongue in impatience, earning a few slaps to the side of his head with the wooden brush.

After his hair was as smooth as it had been when he was an infant and his mother had kept him looking rosy and presentable, she set the brush down on the bed beside her and smiled. He tried to turn his head, suspicious of her, but she tutted and turned his head back around, hitting him lightly on the shoulder.

"Be patient," she said. "Don't you want mother to see how beautiful I can make you?"

"Theresa!" he exclaimed, and attempted to stand. She, being significantly older than him, easily shoved him back down, laughing.

"Calm down, brother. I'm only joking."

He said nothing, only seethed silently as her cool fingers ran through his hair.

"You know," she continued. "Many great warriors have braids in their hair, for the loved ones they protect. It's a symbol of the women-folk they had to leave at home, something they proudly display on the fields of battle, something that shows they will do anything to return to their woman and the family whose fingers wound those braids."

He was quiet for a moment. Then, "Really?"

"Yes, really. When mother comes home on my birthday, you can show her, and she'll be proud of you."

He had sat through the rest of the braiding with his scrawny chest puffed out and a gleam in his eyes. And when she was finished with him, he stood, hustled over to the cracked and fingerprint-smudged mirror propped up in the corner of the cottage, and examined the braid, turning it over anxiously in one bare hand while clutching the bulky glove he had taken off of it in the other.

"And you're sure this is brave and courageous and all that?" he asked, tugging on the short braid.

"Of course," she replied. "I had a dream about it. The braid I mean. That you had one. We were standing in the Meadow, and something bad happened, but you were real brave about it." Her eyes we glazed over, and her arms hung limply at her sides. "I've been having that dream a lot lately. I can never remember what the bad thing is." She shook her head as if to clear it. "Anyways. I got this feeling that I should braid your hair, that you needed it." She shrugged. "So I did."

He looked at her queerly then, as if he were about to thank her for something he was not quite sure of, but then their father burst into the room with a grin on his face and a few rabbit carcasses slung over his shoulder, all tied together with a piece of twine, and the moment passed.

A few days later, after all had been said and done and he found himself quite alone in the washroom at the Guild quarters, torn and tattered and covered in blood, he realized that he had completely forgotten about the braid in his now mud and vomit caked hair.

He fingered the braid, remembered his sister's wide, toothy smile, his mother's warm laugh, turning into the screams of the villagers in his mind even as he thought of it,and his father's warm, calloused hand on his shoulder, so different from the cold, clammy flesh he had clutched, sobbing as the world around him burned.

Tears streaked down his face, and an unknown anger filled him, so foreign, so massive in its implications, that it was all he could do to choke down the scream building in his throat to a hoarse whimper. His fingers found the braid in his hair, and he tore it roughly loose, ignoring the sharp pain in his scalp.

Later, he regretted it. He wished he had kept the braid a little while longer, as a memento, as a reminder of what and who he was fighting for. He once asked Whisper to braid his hair for him, but it didn't feel right, and he took it out soon after. When he met and married his wife, she braided his hair for him, and he left it in, but it wasn't the same.

It wasn't until his daughter was born, and she grew, and with her chubby toddler fingers she clumsily wound his hair together into what was little more than a glorified knot, that he had that burning in his chest again, that knowledge that every drop of blood he spilled was justified, that he was very and truly alive.

And when he walked through the door to his house in Bowerstone, and laid his sword against the doorframe, and kissed his wife and threw his six year old son over his shoulder, he would look down at his little girl, whose eyes would light up at the sight of the braid still in his overgrown hair, and he would think of Theresa, her namesake.


End file.
